a2stuff / a2stuff/a2d

Replace current shortcuts concept with aliases

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#751 3 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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DeskTop feature request
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Assembly
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

I was watching a video about the Lisa and it put me in the mood to think about how the Macintosh was forced by limited time and lack of memory/ROM/disk resources to be extremely minimal. No bells and whistles. And like much great art, editing down often makes things better. Lots of the improvements to A2D have been by removing things to simplify the experience.

One thing that really stands out in A2D as surprising complexity are the Shortcuts, called Selector items in the original MouseDesk/A2D 1.1. From the perspective of "how can we make a simplified launcher, and turn desktop into an editor for the entries?" it makes sense. But it's a lot of added complexity. What's a simpler, more general approach? What would the Macintosh team in 1984 have done?

Well, we don't know, but thanks to time travel we can look ahead into the future of 1991, where System 7 introduced three things: (1) the Apple Menu and (2) a Launcher that were both populated by (3) Aliases. Instead of a dedicated editor for menu entries (e.g. Font/DA Mover), you just combine the primitives - file selection, alias creation, and file drag/drop. DeskTop already did this for the DESK.ACC folder (now called APPLE.MENU). What's missing are Aliases.

So... I'm thinking of introducing a Shortcut file type. (It took ~15 minutes to code up support, but I'm not sure I'll incorporate it any time soon.)

NOTE: the LNK file type and Special > Make Alias command were added in v1.3

The idea is to replace the entire Shortcuts-as-a-special-file-and-dedicated-editor with a menu populated from a folder (maybe SHORTCUTS/), and a "Make Shortcut" command that makes a shortcut to the selected icon, and drops it in that folder. No more need for Edit/Delete/Run a Shortcut commands - they're just files in a folder. The optional Selector module just enumerates the directory, shows the first 24 items. Easy peasy!

The down sides include:

  • can't put special characters in the names (because they're just filenames)
  • can't explicitly distinguish entries in the menu vs. just in the dialog (but does anyone really understand that?)
  • refreshing the menu dynamically when the folder is modified is tricky (but worth it? could apply to Apple Menu too #301)
  • no way to edit a shortcut, or diagnose a problem with it. Do we need "Show Original" ?

This also lets us extend the number of items in the Shortcuts menu (#299) to 11 (14 total items minus "Make Shortcut", "Show Shortcuts", and a separator)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with RELEASE-NOTES.md and the optional Selector module mentioned in the issue, then review the existing Shortcuts behavior alongside the LNK file and Special > Make Alias additions. Clarify the replacement scope, folder and menu semantics, and migration impact; done should be a decided design with identified implementation points and acceptance checks.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
desktop-dev, operating-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
28/100

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